Breaking Barriers in STEM: EDI in practice

India Thomson (00:07)
Hello everyone. Welcome back to Hercube, our second episode. Today I’m joined by a very special guest, Dr. Athina Frantzana, a leading EDI expert with a STEM background in Geoscience and Planetary Physics whose decade plus work spans major organisations whose pioneering PhD examined women’s experiences in advanced computing. A seasoned keynote speaker, workshop leader and coach known for practical EDI strategy and imposter syndrome program

and Scotland’s mental health first aid instructor. And she’s here to share what actually works to build a fairer workplace. Athina, welcome.

Dr. Athina Frantzana (00:41)
Thank you, India. I’m very happy to be here.

India Thomson (00:46)
So, can you tell us a bit about your journey into STEM, from geoscience and planetary physics to where you are today? Of course.

Dr. Athina Frantzana (00:52)
⁓

It’s a long story. I’ll try to keep it short. So yeah, so I studied Geoscience and my bachelor’s degree and my Master’s was in Geoscience and Geochemistry. And then I moved to Edinburgh from Greece where I’m originally from to do a PhD in planetary physics. So my experience there

being in a very male dominated environment at a kind of like more advanced now academic kind of stage made me realise how much women were underrepresented and kind of like what the barriers were. I decided to co-found a network for women that

use advanced computing, high-performance computing from a variety of STEM backgrounds, including physics, obviously, just to give them some space to discuss these barriers and share their experiences. And this kind of like led to me wanting to understand more and wanting to do more to support women, including myself.

So then I decided to swap my kind of studies to do a social research to identify those barriers and the solutions for women in advanced computing. So it was based on my personal experience whilst I was doing my physics PhD when I realised that the culture

of being a woman, know, how it feels to be a woman in a very male dominated environment and how you are kind of perceived and treated. And, it wasn’t great, just to put it that simple and you really had to prove yourself, more than male colleagues had to. There was always a weird dynamic of

like being a kind of like woman who had to communicate with all male professors and academics and go to conferences and trying to identify another woman to have a conversation. It was just hard. And that wasn’t the only reason obviously that I decided to change kind of direction.

It was also because I wasn’t particularly happy with project I was working on, but it was definitely a reason that made me to want to look deeper into the problems and how I can help women to stay in STEM fields and progress and thrive.

India Thomson (03:32)
What was sort of the underlying message that came out of your PhD or the finding?

Dr. Athina Frantzana (03:37)
So for the particular community, like, the high performance computing or advanced computing or super computing, like call it whatever you like. it’s, it’s not very much different than, than other STEM fields is just that it, attracts people from different STEM fields. So it’s kind of like an umbrella, field. That was the interesting, one of the interesting parts of my research. It was that I talked to people from different

STEM fields like physicists, chemists, biologists, everything like medical professionals. So it seemed like the problem is as you’re trying to, as women trying to progress is that they meet these barriers because of the culture. As I mentioned earlier, which was what I faced as well, which is built from men.

For men. So it’s a lot of different little or big things that cause women to either not want to have a STEM career or when they want to really struggle to succeed or they just have to kind of accept the fact that ⁓ this is how it’s going to be. So the main kind of

problem that I identified for the particular community was that as you can imagine about tech and computers and computing sciences and so on is about this geeky culture and how kind of like you have to be a computer geek in order to use computers, which is so funny now that everyone is constantly using a computer to do everything in their life.

So this kind of concept of like, in order to, to do science and to do, to have a career or to be a scientist or to be like, academic or whatever, you have to be a geek. And if you’re not a geek, you kind of like, you’re not welcome. Basically. So, that’s, you know, it’s not that, there aren’t, women that are geeky and that’s absolutely great.

It shouldn’t be the kind of expectation that if you have to be a geek in order to do this. And also just maybe to move further from the studying and the education part further in the career stages. If you want to become an academic or if you want to go to work in STEM fields.

then women also have to face other barriers such as having to have gaps in their career because of maternity leave or because of other caring responsibilities because it is a fact that women are the ones that usually have to deal with caring responsibilities, whatever these are, more than men. And specifically for science, for STEM,

It’s very difficult when you have a gap in your career to come back and continue where you left because things progress so quickly. And it’s very competitive as well. Most of the times the workplace, even, you know, at the university, like it’s really competitive to the point that maybe that was another reason I wasn’t very happy doing my physics degree.

It’s just, it has become very kind of like, who is better than the other than people actually doing science for the humanity, like for finding solutions. So I feel that that is, it’s not very fair, especially when you have to take these career breaks. So of course we’re working towards

finding solutions for that, for example, sharing the leave, but even if we have paternity leave or, you know, if others get a paternity leave or they share the parental leave, there’s still more work for women. It’s impossible to change that because of the nature of the things, but any support that can be provided to women

when they have to take these career breaks will be obviously hugely impactful for them to be able to stay in STEM careers and progress and thrive. But we’re not there yet.

India Thomson (08:05)
read a study recently that reported that women in STEM, 97.5% of those had at least a moderate level of imposter experience. And do think that’s something that women in general experience more so than what men do?

Dr. Athina Frantzana (08:18)
That’s a very good question. It is a common, I mean, if the study says it, I will believe it. And it is something that women have been made to believe or to feel. From my experience, because I do occasionally, I offer coaching for

individuals, know, professionals, more specifically, early career professionals, sometimes, you know, people that change careers. And that happens quite often with tech, like a lot of people change from something else to tech because obviously that’s the future. Also women,

they’re trying to find some support in terms of imposter syndrome and confidence and you know, how they can move forward with their career. When I talk to them and I do have a mix of, you know, of men and women coming to me. I obviously that’s anecdotal and I don’t have like data.

But, you know, from my personal experience with working with these people, I have seen that men have these imposter feelings on kind of like the same amount as women have it. It’s just that they don’t talk about it or they don’t want to reveal these feelings because of the way they might be perceived, you know, that they are weak or they are not good enough to do their job or whatever.

But I can’t imagine any human being not having confidence issues when they are moving from one job to another or when they get promoted and yes, that’s great, but it’s new responsibilities and it’s just in our nature to have confidence

issues, but it’s kind of like feeling that you probably not have what it needs, what is required for the role. But you get over it as you do the job and you learn and you become better and you see the results. But I feel that women have been told that they have confidence issues in an effort to

justify why there is such an under-presentation of women instead of looking at the actual reasons and the actual barriers that trying to once again blame women on kind of like, you are the problem and you should solve it by yourself and everything else is fine. you know, it’s not fair.

India Thomson (11:00)
Yeah. Basically what you’re saying is that actually everyone goes through imposter syndrome and it’s completely normal. And it’s not something to be embarrassed or ashamed of. Actually, the only way that we get more men or people in general feeling that way is to talk about it. Yeah. And to put that out in the open that, everyone does go through this sort of thing and it is normal and we should have those conversations. Now you’ve also done a lot of work on widening participation to different underrepresented groups.

Dr. Athina Frantzana (11:20)
Exactly.

India Thomson (11:27)
what approaches actually work and what’s often done just to tick a box.

Dr. Athina Frantzana (11:31)
So yes, I have done some research in widening participation specifically in engineering and generally in higher education when I was working at the University of Edinburgh and I think that the barriers are quite common for groups that come from disadvantaged backgrounds and for

groups that are underrepresented in specific fields like engineering, for example, and that includes women, which is one of my focus and my expertise. I think the problem is that everyone is trying to do something one thing at a time.

Whereas I believe that there needs to be a holistic approach on how we tackle several barriers, because it’s not just one barrier and it’s not just at one specific time. It’s like it starts from early on. So for example, there needs to be a lot more outreach work that encourages children from disadvantaged backgrounds.

Which is also one of the groups I looked into during my research, and also girls and young women to be interested in STEM. And that doesn’t happen enough or it’s not done properly. So there are kind of sporadic efforts. There are kind of initiatives that they don’t measure their impact.

For me, when you don’t measure the impact of what you do, it’s kind of like meaningless because what is the point of doing something if you don’t know if it actually has an effect or not? And also if you don’t receive feedback in order to make it better or do something else if that doesn’t work. And then it has to continue. So you start early on and then you have to continue throughout, you know, university.

where you need again to provide support for these groups, the underrepresented groups or the groups that potentially feel as outsiders for one or other reason. So, you have to continue ⁓ throughout a higher education and support those underrepresented groups. So for example, women who will be underrepresented, it will be good to offer mentoring or will be good to offer

other types of support that might be beneficial to them to be able to feel more connected and more welcome in these kind of male-dominated environments. And also from a practical perspective, like I was thinking earlier when we discussed about barriers and one of the problems like I had personally as well was that when I was working in the lab, there weren’t

gloves my size for my hands. So it was very difficult for me to do my job safely. So I had to order those gloves by myself because no one cared to, it was just very difficult to explain how this is important and how this is serious.

And this is something I’ve heard from other people as well. And throughout my research, I found similar kind of like problems with equipment and safety equipment and, know, accessibility and so on. I don’t want to go to the examples, the very popular examples of seat belts and all this kind of stuff in cars, but there are so many more examples than that.

So this is also part of how we can support these groups to take into consideration what they need. So we provide that to them. So we make their life easier and obviously help them do their job and progress. And then when we go further to the workplace, similarly provide those opportunities to, you

similar equal opportunities to women and underrepresented groups, other underrepresented groups by creating an inclusive workplace and providing the support that potentially you need. But as I said, think the problem is that a lot of organisations and companies and universities, they just focus on one aspect.

When you don’t work simultaneously, you don’t do all this stuff, this kind of holistic approach, you just missing out. So yes, you might attract some girls to come in the university, but if then the university is not inclusive and welcoming them, they will drop out. And this happens, unfortunately. And if they are, you know, if you provide some support there, but then they go to a workplace where there’s no support, they will just leave that workplace. So it sounds very simple. It’s not very simple.

But it’s not very difficult either if we kind of like understand what we need to do and actually implement it.

India Thomson (16:18)
And I guess that sort of leads nicely on to what some of the common misconceptions are about EDI work and who is qualified to lead it and do this sort of work.

Dr. Athina Frantzana (16:26)
I think it is important to talk about this right now, especially when, I mean, for me that I am an EDI professional and I have been around for a long time and I’ve seen that there is now a really strong backlash to EDI and kind of like why is it needed? That it doesn’t do anything, it doesn’t help, which of course is not the truth. But it is a little bit the truth as well, just because

there are people, unfortunately, that at some point saw EDI as an opportunity to make money, just to put it like that, or as an opportunity to promote themselves or whatever, that they do something nice, something good for the world, but they didn’t really know what they were doing.

It was harmful and it caused damage to the EDI sector and the rest of us that hopefully I believe I’m doing the right thing and I’m trying to support and help organisations and individuals. But having other people causing this damage obviously creates this weird idea about EDI.

In terms of like, but it’s a waste of money, it’s a waste of time. And then they cut the budget. Don’t want to invest. They don’t want to, you know, do all the things that we believe can help and can change the culture and can change the, can improve the workplaces. So I think the problem was also that

A lot people that have lived experience,

thought that by using that and advocating for their respective underrepresented group is just enough to change the culture. But unfortunately, EDI work is a lot more than just advocating. This is needed.

We need people that want to share their personal experiences, but it needs a lot more skills in order to do EDI work. And I think that was another misconception that, you know, if you have a one characteristic, like you’re a woman, you can just go and advocate for a woman. But that’s not how it works. Of course you can share your experience and this is really important.

But it’s not enough. You cannot have organisational institutional and structural changes just by sharing your personal experience. And I think that it’s useful to have that. And I, it was very useful for me to have this experience as a woman in STEM. To build on that though, and gain those skills that needed then to

be able to call myself an EDI expert and an EDI professional. And of course I don’t say that you have to have a PhD necessarily to be an EDI professional. No, that’s not what I mean. But you definitely need to do more than just advocating for your particular group of people.

India Thomson (19:27)
Yeah. And I love that you’ve brought that up and said that because I’ve had that experience previously at a previous workplace where they’ve, you know, I’ve got autism and where they’ve, I’ve sort of disclosed that to them and they’ve said to me, okay, well go and like, you tell us what you need and you go and make a program for us. And it was sort of like, well, where do you even start? Because how do you know what you don’t know? And that’s the big thing is you’re even people with those experiences, lived experiences, you know, of being a woman, of being in an underrepresented group.

You have your lived experience, but that’s all you have. So how do you know the stuff that you don’t know? And it goes so much wider than that. And you almost need that like objective view to see what works, what doesn’t, because you don’t know what your feeling is, like what everyone feels, or if it’s just like self-contained. So I love that you’ve brought that up. And I think we spoke about it previously as well. And that’s something that really stuck with me. The fact that like, yeah.

Dr. Athina Frantzana (20:02)
Yeah.

India Thomson (20:21)
It’s not down to like the individual person who’s lived through that experience to then go and find a solution for the company.

Dr. Athina Frantzana (20:27)
Yeah, absolutely. That is another problem. I mean yes, that happens quite often that the company asks these minorities, let’s put it like that, although I don’t really like the word, to kind of lead on the change. Like they are responsible for it and they have to do it. And this is obviously not the way to do it. But also you have individuals that take the initiative.

And they feel obliged to do it. So it’s, it’s both ways. So both sides are problematic because if you just, as we said, if you just use that as a, as a tool it’s not, it’s not really a tool. It’s good to have it as a base, you know, but you have to really build on it to, understand. And it’s, interesting because, you know, for me EDI is

is a lot of things and it’s not just looking at a specific underrepresented group and how you can support them. You need to have a really broad understanding of society, of politics, of history even, to understand oppression, to understand why.

Some of these groups are underrepresented and, you know, pushed away from certain sectors. And I don’t think that everyone who claims to be an EDI professional or expert have the skills and then have this knowledge rather. Then if we talk about skills, there’s so much there. We’re talking about research. We’re talking about research skills, like understanding data.

Being able to communicate all this, being able to kind of change mindsets and it’s not easy. And the fact that it was treated as a very easy thing, that’s what caused damage because that means that it wasn’t done properly.

India Thomson (22:19)
In the last decade, we’ve seen a growth in the number of EDI roles. And what’s your honest take on how organisations are handling that

Dr. Athina Frantzana (22:26)
So yeah, I agree that as we discussed, feel that some people and organisations saw that as an opportunity. In some cases, there is a kind of like genuine need and a genuine kind of like effort to actually do something about their workplace, their organisations, their…

the employees, the underrepresented groups in their organisations. But quite often, as we discussed earlier, when we talked about the widening participation, but often people are just having these roles or having, doing something like initiatives or programs or whatever, just for the sake of it. You know, just for the kind of

present themselves as caring about inclusion and equality when in fact they just do it to cover the fact that they don’t actually do very much. But they say, look, we have an EDI program. But it goes back to what I saying, if they don’t measure, if they don’t evaluate these programs.

We don’t necessarily know if that has an impact or not. So I have seen, as you said, like a lot of organisations having EDI roles, like EDI officers which can be good and bad depending on who

has these roles, like if these people have the skills as we discussed earlier. I have seen a variety, it’s a broad spectrum of people having little to no skills and people having a good amount of skills and actually having an impact in the organisation.

Obviously as EDI professional, I should say that, yeah, this is great. But I can’t say that unless I know that these EDI roles know what they’re doing and they’re not there as we said, as a box ticking exercise.

India Thomson (24:30)
I did actually see a publication at the government, I think it was released earlier on in the year, which was a work panel report on improving workplace diversity and inclusion. And that report actually found that many employers want to do the right thing, but are implementing EDI initiatives without an evidence base. And don’t know how these initiatives actually impact the company and whether they represent value for money. And that in actually a growing number of cases.

Particularly relating to positive discrimination. The report finds that EDI interventions are proving to be counterproductive.

Dr. Athina Frantzana (25:03)
Yes, I’m not surprised. I know the report you’re talking about. I’m not surprised. And this is something I have, I have been advocating for years because I obviously trying to do the right thing, I have seen all these you know, initiatives and programs that have no impact and there is no actual evidence being promoted and being

kind of like shared as good practice or best practice. And I kind of like want to scream and say like, okay, we have to stop doing what we’re because this is not the right thing. And then they do that. And then it doesn’t have the impact they want, but they don’t know it and nothing’s changing. And then they’re thinking, ⁓ you know, what else is there to do? And I keep, you know, having these

organisations asking me this question, like, you know, what can we do? What can we do? But we already know what we need to do. It’s just, it hasn’t been implemented properly. And this is the problem. Like people gather some data and you know, they say, yeah, we gather data. Yes, we’re under, then we have like less, women. have fewer black people, you know, all this kind of stuff. And then they don’t know what to do with the data.

That goes back to what we were saying that they don’t have the skills, they don’t have the knowledge, they don’t understand. Then you have people saying, oh, we have this women’s program. But actually that doesn’t increase the number of women they attract in the organisations. And they don’t wonder why. They don’t wonder what they do wrong.

They just continue doing the same thing and they promote it and they promote it and they say like, yeah, we do this. It’s amazing. When it’s not really amazing. I’m pretty sure these, all these programs and stuff, they, they probably have, people have good intentions most of the times. There is always something good. I hope there is something good in them. Like I’ve seen some of these programs, they, know,

Especially all these kind of like women programs, women networks, leadership programs and things like that. You, it’s a good opportunity for women to share their experience and, to talk about barriers and all this kind of stuff. But this is not what is going to change the culture and it’s not going to remove the barriers just because we talk about this.

I feel that this is something that a lot of organisations invest a lot of money in. And there is no real kind of evidence that it actually does something. Because as I said, it doesn’t change. It’s kind of like putting the blame again on women and telling them, you need more training.

You need the skills to become leaders, you need all this kind of stuff to progress and you don’t have it so we’ll give it to you. Whereas the actual barriers are not because that women lack leadership skills, that is not the problem. It’s the lack of opportunities, it’s the potential biases, it’s the potential discrimination.

India Thomson (27:56)
So how do we move away from that sort of awareness piece that you speak about to implementing real structural change?

Dr. Athina Frantzana (28:02)
It’s very much relevant to this and this is just an example of the state of the programs. It’s just stop, I think, focusing on putting the responsibility to individuals and kind of try and make organisational changes and structural changes. So for example,

change your processes rather than kind of like saying, I’m going to train these people. I’m not obviously, I’m a trainer. I obviously develop and deliver training and training is really, really important, but just training is not enough. And this is another example of, not taking a holistic approach it’s just providing training. We tick that box and everyone is aware now.

I think, for example, as I saying, for the recruitment process, so remove those barriers. And something I say quite often is like people say in their job,

advert or kind of application if you have reasonable adjustments. If you have, if you need the reasonable adjustments, just let us know. It’s very unlikely, you know, people will not feel comfortable. Some people, okay, will not feel comfortable or confident enough, especially when they are candidates, you know, they are applying for a job and they want to be presented, as good, candidate. They will not.

Call you to tell you, yes, I need this. In most cases, unless of course we’re talking about very specific, special needs and special cases, you can provide this. Most people can provide a lot of adjustments just to cover the majority of the kind of needs. Like example, flexible time, flexible dates on when the interviews are.

Kind of like accessible premises. Like why do you have your interview on the third floor when you don’t have accessible kind of entrance or whatever. it’s important for organisations to start becoming proactive rather than the reactive. And I think this has been a problem a lot.

with EDI that, and I understand that because it’s something new. It’s not really because humans have been around for a long time. So it equality shouldn’t be a new concept. But it is kind of like, you know, in environments that have been to talk about my expertise, my area, my focus area, you know, which is STEM and

STEM has been traditionally male dominated and so it’s kind of new in this environment to talk about bringing more women, for example. But now we know mostly what we need to do. So let’s do it instead of just continue talking about it. And then when the problem comes, we’re thinking, what are we going to do? And then we’re losing talent and

we’re wasting our time and people’s careers and so on. So I think that’s probably the best way to put it.

India Thomson (31:08)
think it’s also very helpful to sometimes be told the practical examples of like an example of what you can do. That’s also very helpful because sometimes when people speak about examples and stuff like that and not giving a practical example means, okay, I think this is right, but is it actually right? So having you sort of explain what you actually mean by this is quite helpful.

I guess another question I had was what good allyship looks like in your view, especially from those in leadership positions, because I guess it does sort of translate from the top down.

Dr. Athina Frantzana (31:35)
Yes, I agree. So allyship is again, a quite popular topic in the EDI sphere. And I think it’s an important one. It’s not only for leaders, obviously, but yeah, I agree that it has to be like leaders should be role models for the organisations. And if they, you know,

promote this attitude of being allies that hopefully will be reflected in the rest of the organisations. When we talk about allyship, can be a lot of things, kind of like the principle of allyship is for people to understand the challenges and the unique challenges and barriers of the various underrepresented groups.

Then kind of be supportive as much as they can and make sure if it’s in within their kind of remit and power to try and remove those barriers as much as they can, obviously. But when we talk about leaders, most of the times you hope that they should be able to remove these barriers.

It’s important for leaders to be connected with the organisations, to have themselves to be available, to be accessible. So employees feel comfortable and confident enough to talk about their challenges and their problems. And in terms of from their side leaders,

should be the ones kind of like, you know, that they take all this information and then use the right help and the right support, for example, from the EDI officers or the EDI people or the HR people or whoever, to make sure that these employees are heard and their challenges and problems are heard.

India Thomson (33:19)
Actually, I’ve been very privileged to see the sort of EDI policies and how to do them correctly through Prewired which is how we met. And Prewired for those of you that don’t know is a coding club for those under 19. We host weekly sessions and then also host sessions, summer make-athons and winter sort of events where we get together and we teach kids to code. It’s stemmed out of the university as a way to offer

extracurricular activities to those that are interested, but also as a way to offer more representation and to allow children to sort of see the wide ranging careers that they can have in tech and that women do have in tech and other underrepresented communities also do have and thrive and succeed at. For me, getting involved with Prewired was very much a way to give back to my community and also to meet other individuals who were also in the tech sector because

When I moved to Scotland, I didn’t know any other females in the tech industry and it is quite male dominated. What was sort of your reasoning for getting into it and for having the role that you have in the organisations now?

Dr. Athina Frantzana (34:19)
So, Prewired is, something that I really enjoy doing. it’s obviously, as you said, we both volunteer there and it’s, another attempt from my side to, to try and have, an impact on trying to attract, children

with a focus obviously on underrepresented groups to be interested in tech. So it is an outreach program. It is an outreach organisation that’s something that’s very close to my heart. And I believe that, as I said earlier, this is a huge part. It should be a huge part of a holistic effort

to encourage children and people from underrepresented groups to be interested in STEM careers. And I feel that Prewired is doing that successfully. It’s again, it has been a challenge to be able to attract girls and that’s something we’re looking into it. So that’s how kind of I got involved with Prewired because I was invited to support, with

understanding why we don’t have enough girls in Prewired. That was five years ago. And then, you know, I got more connected to the community there, which is an amazing community. And we do some amazing stuff all together and everyone’s very passionate and this is obvious and we can see the

make sure that we create an inclusive environment for us volunteering there, but also for the participants.

And in order to make sure that we do that, we provide training and we have policies and we talk about things and we kind of share expertise. So for example, we recently developed an online safety policy and we used the expertise of one of our volunteers who

is an expert in online safety and I worked very closely with her to develop that. For me, this is a huge achievement and it kind of like shows that we make sure that we do anything we can to protect our participants and give them the best experience at Prewired

India Thomson (36:44)
I mean, also with Prewired the initiative that you did lead a few months ago was Astro Pi. Would you like to talk about that and how that sort of came about?

Dr. Athina Frantzana (36:53)
Yes, of course. That’s also something I’m very proud of, but also it was very small, but my hope and plan is to make that bigger next year. So Astro Pi is a program that is initiated by ESA, the European Space Agency. Now that sounds a bit random, but it’s not because I’m also

the chair of the New Voices in Space for Space Scotland. My group, the New Voices in Space, we are trying to promote EDI in space and promote careers in space and attract more people, specifically from underrepresented groups, to be interested in space careers.

So through that, I made the connection with Prewired and we kind of developed a very small pilot program of kind of having some of our sessions for the month of March, I believe to have like a space theme. So we did have a speaker that came and talk about space medicine, which was really, really interesting and the kids loved it.

we gave the opportunity to the kids to do the Astro pi project, which was coding. They were coding kind of pictures that when then broadcasted in the international space station. And they were receiving kind of like a certificate that says your picture was broadcasted in the international space station. And, it is a really cute

way to show children what they can do with coding and connect also the potential of them working in space. So my hope is for next year and for the years to come to make this like a kind of staple kind of standard program for Prewired and in collaboration with Space Scotland to have more of this kind of

initiatives and encourage children to be interested in space and programming.

India Thomson (38:54)
Do you think the space sector faces unique inclusion challenges compared to other areas of STEM?

Dr. Athina Frantzana (38:59)
I don’t know, what do you think when someone says I’m a space scientist to you? What’s the first, that’s a quiz. What is the first thought that comes in your mind?

India Thomson (39:10)
that’s like in a lab.

Dr. Athina Frantzana (39:11)
Exactly. That is a good answer. Or, know, when someone says I work in space, the instant kind of thought is an astronaut or someone who’s a genius. You know, that’s not rocket science. It’s not, you know, it’s someone who’s really, really clever. And I think this is again, a misconception. Not that these people are not clever. Don’t get me wrong. But, you know, the idea of

how it is promoted, the narrative skills and interests you need to have in order to be interested in in space it needs to change. Because there’s so much you can do in the space sector rather than just be an astronaut, which is amazing, obviously.

There’s so much more. For example, we mentioned earlier the space medicine presentation we had at Prewired. So that’s one aspect that not many people know. Like I meet people that do space law, that they do like space nutrition, like amazing. There’s so much more. And also other things that are not necessarily kind of that advanced,

people who make the spacesuits, people that, code for space stations and for rockets and for, you know, engineers and all this stuff. But there’s so much you can do in space. And also the idea of why we have a space sector, like what does the space sector do? Again, there is a real misconception there.

Actually, one kid at Prewired said, why do we need to go to other planets? We first need to solve the problems in earth. So why do we need space sector? And that was a really valid question and very valid point, but we do use space to understand what’s happening in earth and to protect earth and to improve earth and humanity. And that is something that it’s not very known.

So, there is a misconception about, it’s just for people that are, you know, crazy about planets and, you know, the space and they just want to reach people that want to build their own rockets and just travel for the, for the lols, you know, for fun, for the experience. I mean, obviously it would be a great experience. I want to go to space, but, probably I don’t have the skills,

we have to understand that it is a lot more than just that, that space sector does. And there are so many different roles that someone can have and that you don’t need to have a PhD in physics or engineering or to be able to work in space. So these are obviously barriers for groups like

people from underrepresented backgrounds or women, you know, to feel like they are the right people to work in space. So this is something we’re trying to change through our work in Space Scotland.

India Thomson (42:05)
Thank you, that’s really interesting. And thank you very much as well for your time today. I feel like I’ve learned a lot and there’s definitely stuff there which we can implement within Hypercube as well. So that’s fantastic. So Athina, where can people follow your work or reach out if they want to collaborate, learn more or even use your expertise in their organisations?

Dr. Athina Frantzana (42:14)
Thank you.

So I guess the best way to reach out via LinkedIn so people can find me on LinkedIn. I’m the only Athina Frantzana so that’s quite easy for people to find me. And I’m based in Scotland but obviously I have worked with organisations around the UK and even Europe and US.

Very happy to have a discussion and find the best approach and the best solutions for your organisations.

India Thomson (42:52)
Well, thank you very much for joining us today. Thank you for

Speaker 1 (42:54)
Thank you very much for inviting me. Really great. Talking to you.